The exemplary embodiment relates to the field of question answering and finds particular application in connection with an interface for web-based community question answering which enables cross language querying and information mining.
Community question answering (CQA) websites allow users to post questions in their own language and respondents to post answers to those questions, often for a limited time period, such as a few days. The questions and answers are often archived, allowing subsequent users of the website to query the archive using keyword searching tools. Such websites exist for many countries. By way of example, Yahoo! Answers is a group of websites where users can post questions, and an active community provides answers. Such websites are organized by country. For example, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Philippines, Quebec, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States, etc may each have their own website.
Where two countries use the same language, such as Argentina and Spain, users may be given the opportunity to search on their national site only or on all sites of the same language. Users of sites where the pool of respondents is relatively small, however, may receive few useful answers, particularly when the questions posed require knowledge not readily available to the respondent pool. For example, a user in Thailand may have a question about a soccer player in Brazil or education levels in a particular province in China.
Machine translation tools allow users to submit a chunk of text in one language and have the text translated into another language. Automated machine translations are also offered by search engines when a user's keyword query retrieves results in another language.
The exemplary embodiment provides an interface which allows users to pose questions and receive answers in their own language without having to navigate a website of a different country in an unfamiliar language.